Having lost everything in an agonizing divorce, Chin-Fen takes work as a public sanitation worker in hopes of winning back custody of her son. However, while backbreaking work is enough to clear the city’s garbage away each day, she finds sweeping away emotional debris a much trickier proposition.
After eight years of marriage and life as a fulltime housewife, Chiang Chin-Fen moves into her late mother’s old room in the family home. Once settled, her hopes turn to securing a stable job and then custody again over her son. She eventually applies for a sanitation job with the county government. Yes it will mean working in filth and less-than-comfortable conditions…but the pay is better than most service jobs, and she’ll have at least some of the protections and benefits of civil service employment. She takes the admissions test and, soon after, secures the job offer.
Work on a garbage truck making its hectic and noisy neighborhood rounds was so much harder and more exhausting than she’d imagined. Chin-Fen and her teammates made easy and regular targets for neighborhood nigglers who, after dumping their trash to the tinny strains of Badarzewska’s “Maiden’s Prayer” blaring as always from the loudspeakers, would invariably complain...“It’s too loud (or not loud enough).” “You’re blocking the road.” “You guys stink.” “Can’t you be more disrespectful?”…The team was also always at risk of injury because of people not sorting their trash properly. But for Chin-Fen, this was all part of the “price” of a return to normalcy. With a stable job, she knew she had a chance at another custody hearing. It was at this point that she got the call that changed her life.
The author takes a light and lively approach to this narrative that follows the emotional rollercoaster of everyday life. Readers see the sacrifices and hardships imposed upon those doing jobs essential to making modern society tick and, through the protagonist’s lived experience, see that sanitation workers seek respect not in vacuous praise but rather in small, simple and genuine signs of appreciation.